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Culture and Anarchy (Rethinking the Western Tradition)

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Matthew Arnold, a British poet and critic, wrote on the importance of culture in this work. He defined culture, famously, as "sweetness and light" - implying that culture represented everything good, everything not barbaric. The work is most important for the way it forwards the notion of an "organic" society - that is, a society that evolves slowly, that grows into maturity, that does not strive for sudden "advances" led by experts working all at once to implement great change. For anyone wondering about the relationship between modern conservatism and classical Liberalism, this is a decent place to start. "I am a Liberal," Arnold writes in the introduction, "yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture." If you wish to take an intellectual journey from Burke to Bork, Arnold must make up one leg of your trip.

So much of modern criticism has go so far afield, that the appellation has almost lost any sense to it. To recapture what criticism meant before the novel, but useless ideas of structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism, et alia, Matthew Arnold is about as good a place to begin. His "Function of Criticism" and "Anarchy and Crticism" have become classics, even if they've been hidden from sight by academicians' self-serving agendas to bring nothing to light. This isn't a "conservative" vs. "liberal" thing, but an "intelligible and meaningful" vs. "labyrinthine and cockamamie" thing. Arnold is like encountering hermeneutics by having first visited Thomas Aquinas, or having studied democracy by having first studied Hobbes. Arnold is a seminal thinker, crtic, and student of the arts and society. He belongs in criticism's lexicon well before de Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, at alia.

This edition is preferable to the gimmicky version published by Yale, where the original text is lost beneath the imposition of leftist ideologues.

[From the Plains of Troy...
awakened from the dream]

[in his own words...]

"The whole scope of the essay is to recommend
culture as the great help out of our present
difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our
total perfection by means of getting to know,
on all matters which most concern us, the best
which has been thought and said in the world,
and, through this knowledge, turning a stream
of fresh and free thought upon our stock
notions and habits, which we now follow

staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining
that there is a virtue in following them
staunchly which makes up for the mischief
of following them mechanically."
* * * * * * * * *

"Culture, which is the study of perfection,
leads us, as we in the following pages have
shown, to conceive of true human perfection
as a HARMONIOUS perfection, developing all
sides of our humanity; and as a GENERAL
perfection, developing all parts of our
society. For if one member suffer, the
other members must suffer with it; and
the fewer there are that follow the true
way of salvation, the harder that way is
to find."
* * * * * * * * *

"Now, and for us, it is a time to Hellenise,
and to praise KNOWING; for we have Hebraised
too much, and have over-valued DOING. But the
habits and discipline received from Hebraism
remain for our race an eternal possession;
and, as humanity is constituted, one must never
assign them the second rank to-day, without
being ready to restore them to the first rank
to-morrow. To walk staunchly by the best
light one has, to be strict and sincere
with oneself, not to be of the number of
those who say -- and do not; to be in
earnest, -- this is the discipline by which
alone man is enabled to rescue his life
from thraldom to the passing moment and
to his bodily senses, to ennoble it, and
to make it eternal."
* * * * * * * * *

Trendy revisionist garbage as to be expected from the Yale imprimature. This edition is strictly for collegial faculty club bores. Get the edition edited by Stefan Collini instead he's less interested in himself.